


Polyhex's Most Famous Disappointment

by Nitrobot



Series: Inheritance [2]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Backstory, Dissection, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Gore, Medical Procedures, Pre-War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-07
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-04-08 04:05:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4290165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nitrobot/pseuds/Nitrobot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It all started when Knockout got caught racing by Cybertron's most celebrated surgeon, who just so happened to be his sire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic made a friend of mine fall in love with Straxus so I'm a bit scared to share it.

Knockout never managed to fully prepare himself for facing his sire, no matter if it was to receive praise or, more often, a scathing scolding. Sometimes he wondered if there was another side to him that only his carrier and what little friends his sire had left in the universe were privy to.

At least he was facing away from the door when Knockout slipped into his suite and nervously nodded to the drones guarding the entrance. The only other mech in the vast room looked out on the skyline of Polyhex, servos behind his back with digits folded over each other. Other than the sound of them tapping together, the penthouse ruled in silence. 

Knockout sent a burst of static through his vocaliser to clear it out. "You summoned me, father?" 

The sound of tapping stopped, replaced with the metallic clack of peds turning. One red optic glared at him while another yellow one gave him a once over look. Knockout often tried to convince himself they were the real reason he could never meet his father's gaze- his optics were always testament to the limits of his surgical abilities. 

"Just because you haven't been dragged here by Enforcers this time doesn't mean you're not in trouble, Knockout," Straxus snapped, walking towards his son in a dangerous slow march. While his ruby armour glowed pristine as always, the purple accents were slightly scuffed under the harsh overhead lighting. He was so furious he'd neglected his evening buffing to be here.

Knockout suddenly felt very small despite being the same height as his sire. "I... don't know what you mean," he said with an innocent and very unconvincing shrug.

Straxus raised the eyeridge above his red optic as its light flared up. "Really? Well, why don't we ask the Iacon News Network?" He pointed and clicked a remote at a monitor larger than him, and it burst into life with the sound of sirens through the speakers and the frantic flashing colours of a high speed chase. Familiar red armour was illuminated under a helicopter's spotlight at the front of the race. Knockout didn't need to read the scrolling headline or listen to the newscaster's voice to know what was happening- he'd been there just a breem ago.

Straxus didn't even wait for his son to admit to leading the whole of Kolkular's police force on a joyride through the city's highways. "Why do you insist on embarrassing me, Knockout?" he asked with a pleading tone that practically belonged to him. "It's certainly not for the reward in winning, so you must do it for the attention, or some kind of adrenaline addiction. Or perhaps you just like breaking rules." There he went, as always unable to resist the chance for a psychiatric evaluation. "I can't tell you how distraught your poor mother is over all this, she's been driven to glitching trying to keep your little disaster contained.

Knockout was expecting the guilt tactics to be deployed soon, but he suspected Straxus had set a new record for bringing them in this time. The tediousness of it all brought on a smug, sarcastic tone he usually wouldn't dare use in his sire's presence. "I've been confined to the tower for over a decacycle, father, I guess I just went a little _stir crazy_."

His smirk melted under Straxus' deadly glare, and even the drones seemed to flinch away from it. "You think this is a joke?"

"I-I-"

Straxus closed the distance to his son before he could choke through the block in his vocaliser. "You think throwing everything I've given you back in my face and ruining my reputation is a laughing matter?" 

Knockout fought not to shiver under the intensity of his father's glower, keeping his composure only by a thin thread of will woven from years of practice. It often wasn't enough, but he held out long enough for Straxus to shutter his optics, dropping his furious accusation in a weary sigh.

"You know I only want the best for you, Knockout." He placed foreign gentle servos on his son's shoulders, looking at him like a turbofox handler would look at a misbehaving pet. "Even if you don't know what the best is just yet. The life I've given you is one I would have given my right servo to have at your age. I won't have you wasting it on the streets- it's an insult to yourself and our entire family." He squeezed his digits around Knockout's shoulder plating, a firm enough reminder of how sharp the claws were as they lightly scarred the immaculate paint. "Do you understand?"

Knockout gulped down a lump of rebellion, knowing he had no choice. "Yes, sire."

Straxus nodded and lowered one servo, keeping the other gripped tightly on a shoulder."I expect your future hobbies to be far more _discrete_." He removed the remaining servo and turned his back to Knockout, clicking the monitor off. "Now get out, you have your medical exam tomorrow. And I'm sure you know what will happen if you fail."

Without a goodbye, Knockout gathered his tattered pride and obediently turned to leave.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I ended up getting a big inspiration rush for this fic, so there'll be plenty of more chapters to flesh out some of my headcanons about Knockout. Chapters themselves will be a lot shorter than what I usually write, mostly to give a 'slice of life' feel and also cause I'm lazy like that.

Knockout had eased himself into the academy lifestyle more out of necessity than desire to blend in. The less he stood out, the less his sire would berate him for imagined slacking and the more he could get away with when optics were averted. 

However, it seemed even the most well behaved son of the Surgeon Council couldn't escape mandatory mentoring.

He knew his teacher would be Pharma, at least for the next vorn, and it wasn't a position many envied. Pharma was one of those mechs bots knew everything and nothing about- everyone knew he'd been removed from the Crystal City Seeker labs, but the reason why varied more than an Omnishifter's alt mode. He was a notorious recluse, preferring to tend more to his projects than his social standing. The only thing no-one knew was _what_ the projects were exactly; the Academy board, more cautious than its Crystal rival, was hesitant to launch investigations against them for some reason. What was most disconcerting, though, was that he'd never accepted proteges before now. Knockout tried not to dwell over what might have changed that forced him so close to the infamous doctor.

Pharma didn't bother greeting him when he found his way to the barren laboratory; aside from a passing glance he kept his attention riveted to two screens towering over him. Knockout noted the elder mech's twitching wings with distaste- Seeker scientists were always the hardest to work with. 

Knockout seated himself and pulled his standard lab kit from his subspace, which at last managed to fully draw Pharma's gaze. He closed down the screens and spun on his ped, one servo folded behind his back. 

"Your station will be on the other side of the lab. Anything outside it is not to be touched under any circumstances without clear permission." He reeled off his rules in a bored monotone, as if the exchange was barely worth the effort of working his vocaliser. "Do you have any idea about what your duties will be?"

Knockout couldn't help but feel a little subconscious under such a condescending look. "I was told I'd mostly be doing clean up for dissections-"

"Good enough," Pharma interrupted him, abandoning his console and striding over to a set of cabinets against a glass wall on the other side of the lab, his wings blocking view whatever it kept contained. "I'm sure you've heard of the new virus spreading through wild turbofox packs. Today we'll be examining a recently deceased infected." He pulled gloves out from a drawer and snapped them onto his servos. "I trust you're not squeamish?" 

"I wouldn't have gotten this far if I was, sir," Knockout replied.

Pharma paused in his preparations, and Knockout could have sworn he was smiling over his shoulder. "You'd be surprised how far a mech can get without a single drop of energon on his digits."

The musing nature of the statement as well as its hushed delivery made Knockout unsure how to respond. Something his sire once said flashed in his processor, better than silence at least. "Well, smart mechs usually wear gloves when handling something messy," he said. 

Pharma's wings twitched, showing they could spread out even wider, as he turned around with a slightly tilted helm and shielded optics. He handed over another pair of gloves to Knockout with a more curious smile now. "And how rare smart mechs are nowadays."

When Knockout slipped the plastic sleeves over his servos, Pharma slid a card through a reader next to a door leading behind the glass wall. 

"Do you have a built-in mouthguard?" he asked, propping the door open as he turned back to his protege. Knockout answered by deploying the two plates sliding from his faceplate edges over his mouth, joining together at his chin stripe as it stretched up to meet just under his optics.

Pharma nodded in approval. "Good. You'll need it."


	3. Chapter 3

"You're Straxus' whelp, aren't you?"

Knockout had always accepted that as a fact known by everyone and their grandcarrier by now ( _"Ah, yes, the surgeon's son," "He has his sire's armour," "He'll be even better than the famed Straxus"_ ; more or less compiled versions of every remark he'd heard since he could register sound waves). Surprise and suspicion, combined with hearing Pharma's voice at all since they began the dissection, made him almost drop the intestine tubing in his hands right back into the turbofox carcass. 

"You know my sire?" His tone was hushed behind his mask as he tried not to fiddle with the gorey strings wreathed through his digits.

Pharma gave him a heavy lidded look under a raised eyeridge, tapping at his own makeshift mask. "Everyone sparked since the Senate's rise knows about your sire." He seemed to have a thing for stating the banally obvious, still working away on the specimen's rusted fuel pump. "I was in a class set just above him in our own Academy days. Does he still have that bichromial defect?"

No matter how skilled and exalted his sire fought to make himself, all discussion always led back to his sole surface-level flaw. It was a small victory against his sire's painstaking perfectionism. "Of course," Knockout replied, to a tut and shaken helm from his mentor.

"Ever since day one he's been pouring over optical studies trying to fix it. One of these days I was certain he was going to Empurata himself, give him only one optic to worry about. A perfectionist of the worst kind..." Pharma's eyeridges furrowed, betraying his hidden scowl as he stared at a cluster of aortal fuel lines, probably imagining Straxus frowning back at him. 

Knockout tried that with his nest of slick ropes in his servos and almost squeezed them into useless chunks. He dumped them aside into a disposal tray, hoping Pharma didn't just see him come so close to splattering them both with gore. "Well, on his behalf, I apologise for following his lead and making you stuck with me for the next stellar cycle." It was a neutral assent, more like a formality that had to be addressed sooner or later. 

Rather than merely swipe the words aside, Pharma gave him the heavy-lidded look again. It was like staring up at his sire after he'd just been caught playing with his wax bottles. "Actually... I made the request for an assistant," the elder informed.

Knockout hovered a scalpel above a sensor cluster, not trusting himself to slice in with his processor prickling with suspicion. "You've never had one before," he said. "Why take one on now?"

Pharma gave a ghost shrug with his wings. "I have my reasons. I'll decide whether I want to tell you them or not later." He discarded the last clump of tubes in his own tray, leaving the thick chamber of the dead spark untouched. Still wearing gloves, he folded his energon-soaked servos behind his back, wings held high. "Analysis?"

It took Knockout a dangerous nanoklick to realise he was waiting for a findings report, on the spot. He cleared his vocaliser to buy him some more time and didn't let himself pause for a vent; "The virus entered through the main fuel line, indicating that it is transferred via food contamination. It didn't spread far before taking over the entire fuel pump and killing the specimen, further indicating that it's still early in evolution. Most likely it is destined to be a parasite, designed to keep the host alive for much longer and eventually penetrate the spark casing."

It was a hypothesis that Pharma must have arrived at before the beast was even cut open. The mask coincidentally hid whatever he might have thought about Knockout's wording, but the lilt of his eyeridge was unmistakably proud. He'd seen his carrier do the same whenever she beamed at him. 

"I've been impressed twice so far today, Knockout," Pharma relented, peeling his gloves off with the stoicness of a mech well used to gore on his digits. "Make it a daily occurrence of three and you might just get through the stellar cycle." Throwing the gloves in with the entrails, he couldn't see Knockout's low breath of relief. One solar cycle survived. 

He was only just removing his own gloves when the room lights flicked out, the only illumination coming from the blurry window into the main lab. "Make sure you put all the remains in the right bins. The cleaning drones go a bit haywire when they find an optic in a wire container," Pharma called over his shoulder, leaving in a flurry of his wings.

In all the revelations Knockout had forgotten the golden rule of academy life; the young ones always got stuck with clean up.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dragstrip is a femme in TFA, so that's the version I'm using here.

Protihex Academy was host to a sprawling campus complete with canteen, laboratories, computer banks, rec rooms, even a mercury pool. Knockout only ever had time for the libraries though, practically barricading himself in with the bookpads all through the night. Pharma seemed to expect him to know the intimate anatomy of everything on Cybertron down to a squirming amoeba, so on top of homework every decacycle he had his work cut out for him. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing; it staved off the horrors of boredom, and stopped him getting homesick. His sire's daily lectures and room inspections he was glad to be rid of, but his carrier's embraces... her absence made him feel cold even sitting below a window bathed in midday sunlight.

Most of all though, he missed the midnight races. All the textbooks and hypotheses in the galaxy could have distracted him from the incessant twitching of his idly wheels, the aching rev of his engine as it pined for the road and the squeal of sirens fading behind him. 

As if that wasn't enough to put up with, he'd had a shadow for the past few days. She'd been hovering around the shelves and community computers, not-so-slyly glancing over at him while pretending to flick through index cards. She didn't look like a med student; sunrise yellow plating that almost rivaled Knockout's gold accents, winglets jutting out of her shoulders. The Academy was almost solely restricted to a safe palette of red, white and blue, but no-one seemed to give her a second look.

Either she really was invisible to them, or he was the victim of some very obscure prank.

Boldness seemed to grip her today and throw her over to his table, plonking her down opposite him and letting her leaf through his stack of datapads. 

"Can I help you?" Knockout asked through gritted denta, tearing his optics away from a tedious account of Insecticon hunting habits.

The femme decided to finish her flicking before answering, placing her helm on the table with optics staring sideways at him. "Probably not. You're Pharma's new project, aren't'cha?"

She wasn't the first to ask him about his unusual mentor, though most went with something like 'victim'. "You could say that." Knockout huffed sigh through his vents and went back to studying. As his optics flicked down to his pad, the text was covered by the femme's servo shooting out towards him, digits wiggling.

"I'm Dragstrip," she chirped, hovering her hand until he finally shook it. Neither med student colours or name, it seemed. 

"Knockout." Even the paint on her digits seemed to shine between his silver ones, keeping him staring even after she relented and pulled her servo back. She must have noticed his ogling, or she wasn't done staring at him from up close from how her optics swept over his frame in a crimson wave..

"You have a nice paint job," she noted. Knockout couldn't help but wonder if she knew he was thinking the same thing. "You get the finish done at Fanta's shop?"

A crimson eyeridge raised itself above a pair of his wide optics. Phantasma (only called Fanta out of her audio-range) was the best custom bodyworker this side of the city state that no-one had heard of. At least, no-one who'd never braved the lower layers of Tyrest to find her workshop. Dragstrip certainly looked the type to go prowling the underground come nightfall, but even so...

He hid his suspicion under an easy veneer of pride. "Only the best for me," he quipped, swinging a servo behind his helm to better show off the charcoal design on them.

Dragstrip suddenly grinned, and thrust one of her immaculate digits in his face as she leaned over. "Aha! I knew I recognised you!" She was at least twenty decibels above the allowed volume of any sound in a library. "You're the guy who got Iacon cops to chase you all around the city!"

Knockout was too focused on shushing her before the clerk kicked them both out to fully notice her accusation. When she finally reseated herself and kept her smug discovery confined to her smirk, he was scowling. "That was a long time ago." 

Dragstrip scoffed with a quirked eyeridge. "Three vorns ain't a long time, buddy." He wasn't inclined to agree, being grounded without datanet access for two of them. By then he'd been forgotten by Cybertron's scattered racing enthusiasts/police harassers, replaced by some hot rod jumping half of Metroplex and literally burning rubber- that is to say, his wheels were on fire the whole time. 

The memory of the spurning didn't help his scowl. "Whatever. I have better things to do than waste fuel on chases nowadays." He'd already closed his datapad down and started to gather the rest of them, resolving to finish the evening's work in his dorm. 

Dragstrip watched him readying to leave with an almost-pout, not speaking until he was on his peds.

"So I guess you don't want to see the races tonight?"

The datapads suddenly weighed ten tons each, spilling out of his servos. "...What races?"

Dragstrip smirked at him again. He felt like he could get used to the sight.


	5. Chapter 5

Dragstrip sighed contently as she gulped down another shot of high-grade with servos slung over the race barricades. Knockout found the roadside refreshments watered-down and overpriced, but he paid for them anyway- it was his sire's credits, after all. The whole feel of the underground wasn't much different from his usual haunts, where everyone knew him by paint job. He swore some bots threw second glances over at him as he milled in the makeshift seats elevated above the gloomy track. The start line was messy streaks of white checkered against the pitted tarmac, with chewed up tires marking the sides of it. Overhead, the bridge between Protihex and Polyhex arched up, blocking out the stars and, most importantly, any Enforcer spotlights spying on them all.

"You don't look like a med-student, y'know," Dragstrip said, just loud enough to be heard over the mingling crowd around them.

"Speak for yourself," he remarked over his glass, treating himself to another glance over her frame. Lithe even for a femme, each plane of metal sculpted with speed in mind. She belonged on the racetracks of one of Kolkular's engineering academies, not stowed away behind walls with her olfactories stuck in medical journals.

She smirked, either from his optics or his tone, and pulled her right servo up while pointing at a thin white line breaking up her gold plating. "Whole family has the usual white armour getup," she admitted, bringing her servo back down with a shrug. "I don't like it so much, doesn't go with my optics, so I go to Fanta's every vorn for a spray paint. At least the maroon is natural." She turned around, now slinging her servos back on the barricade.

"What's your real colors then, KO? Trying to hide some bright yellow curse from Primus under all that red?" She lazily swept a servo over him, cracking a grin at the offended look that surely bloomed on his faceplate. 

"I'm _all_ natural, I'll have you know." If there was one thing he could thank Straxus for, it was passing on a fortunate colour palette to him. 

Dragstrip favoured a raised eyeridge as she switched herself back around, peering out at the starting line below. "Well, we'll see how much all that 'natural' gets scuffed out on the road."

Knockout was saved from another grimacing gulp of his high-grade, optics whirring wide. "You... said we were just watching-"

"Oh, yeah, I lied. We're racing. I signed us up on the way in. No way I'm missing the chance to see you drift for myself." She threw her high-grade cup aside and- he thought she was going to vault over the barrier, but at the last klick she just pushed off it and headed towards where the track officials were assessing the impatient lines of hopeful racers. 

Dragstrip was halfway there before she noticed Knockout wasn't following her, too busy conjuring up the outrage on his sire's and disappointment on his carrier's faceplates if they knew their son was right back where he started.

She faced his troubled look with one of smugness. "Unless you're scared of getting your pretty little aft kicked out there," she cooed, wiggling her own one at him for emphasis. 

All thoughts of Straxus and Firestar and even his finish swept away in a cloud of exhaust, replaced with a hard glare in his optics. "I could beat you with two wheels disconnected from my T-cog," he assured her, marching over as pride took over his spark.

If anything, her smugness only doubled itself. "Well, better hope all that reading hasn't turned your engine to rust," she snorted back with a hard thump on his shoulder, running ahead with a surprising burst of speed before he could respond in kind. Before the competitive craze completely consumed him, he noticed her aft was wiggling again with every step.


	6. Chapter 6

"Looks like someone didn't get a lot of recharge last night," Pharma noted as Knockout dragged himself into the lab the next morning. The red mech's vocaliser was still trying to boot itself up, trailing behind his already lagging processor, so all it managed to reply with was a grunt.

Even with his back turned, he could sense some offense from Pharma as the elder medic's EM field crackled. "I doubt you spent the last twelve breems studying," he added cryptically.

Knockout paused mid-yawn and quirked an eyeridge as he turned toward his mentor.This wasn't the first time he'd sloped in still half-submerged in recharge, but it was the first time Pharma had made any notice of it. "What makes you say that, sir?"

Now he noticed the remote in Pharma's servo, and the screen mounted on the wall behind him. Usually it displayed chemical analyses, results and charts or otherwise stayed blank; but now it projected a nighttime chase through the south of Protihex. Knockout was hit with a jolt of extreme déjà vu that shouldered all fatigue from his frame. 

"Oh. _That_." Despite the forced deadpan, the fizzle of static in his voice betrayed him. Ever since that first night when Dragstrip stole him away, he'd been lured back to racing like a thermoth to a plasma flame. He was addicted to it, forever anxious for the slick slipstream of wind along his plating as his tires span fast enough to burn away underneath him. The adrenaline rush was better than all the energon reserves on the planet.

And, since the cycle was already running laps around itself, Knockout had gotten cocky again. He'd have blamed Dragstrip for it, if she wasn't the one who told him to stay off the main highways and out of range of Enforcer cameras. And if he wasn't so grateful for the most exhilarating evenings of his life. 

His sire would be throwing his vocal circuits at the morning news report and disowning him before the day was finished. And from the sadistic sparkle in Pharma's optics, he knew it just as well as him.

"How long have you managed to go without getting caught, Knockout? Two, three decacycles?" Pharma asked, leaving the screen on as a backdrop to his smugness. Or maybe all Seekers managed to look that insufferably proud when their wings were lifted higher than their helms. 

He had reason to be smug anyway; he knew exactly when Knockout had started turning Protihex into his alt-mode's playground. 

"...I don't know what you're talking about," the young mech said lamely.

Pharma homed in instantly on how ramshackle his defense was. "So I haven't seen you vaulting the academy's north gate with a certain golden femme every night?" he asked with all the charm of a Sharkticon. 

Knockout balled his digits and gulped down his rising dread. He wasn't in the mood for any games. "If you're planning on blackmailing me with this, sir-"

Pharma's lofty wing cables faltered as confusion buckled his smugness. "Who said anything about blackmail?" 

All Knockout could do was return his confusion, watching him switch the screen off at last and stride over to a cabinet- one that had been locked since the day Knockout had arrived.

"If I was in the business of manipulation, I could have had your sire arrested three times over before he even graduated," Pharma informed him as he pulled out drawers, flipping through files of datapads with the speed of a petrorabbit in his digits. "No, no, I have something much less... crude in mind." He found what he was looking for in the third drawer, sliding it out and slamming the other ones away. 

"You wanted to know why I asked for an assistant this stellar cycle," he said, numbly dragging his optics down the pad's screen. 

Knockout remembered the conversation well. "And you wouldn't tell me."

Pharma paused his reading to flick his optics up with a smirk flashing beneath him. "Until now."


	7. Chapter 7

"The truth is, I have a little side project you might be able to help with..."

Pharma must have flicked a light switch, and Knockout squinted as light suddenly flooded the room like the sun filling an ancient chasm for the first time. He'd never noticed the room before, with the door blending in so well with the walls of the lab. It didn't even have a card reader, but Pharma did something with his optic pressed against the wall that eventually opened the panels up into an eerie darkness.

Now with the darkness banished in a bloom of stinging light, Knockout took in the rows upon polished rows of silver gurneys and berthside tools of torture laid out before him. It was a long but narrow room, enough so that it could be hidden away by a careful bot.

Whether Pharma counted as 'careful' or 'psychotic' at this point, he wasn't so sure of. 

"The Academy doesn't like funding anything without the Senate's direct approval," Pharma explained in a voice that seemed to echo through the secret chamber, ringing in the metal of Knockout's frame as he paced down the grisly surgical corridor. "And all they care about is science that keeps the low castes low and the high ones raking in credits for sitting on their afts all day. That's all fine and dandy, but... it does get boring." He plucked an instrument Knockout couldn't recognise- something like a shrapnel extractor but shaped for an optic- from one of the tables. Still standing in the doorway, Knockout also couldn't recognise if his mentor was studying the tool or playing with it.

"What's all this about, sir?" he asked with only the slightest tremble, peds still rooted to the floor for his own safety. He wasn't eager to be by Pharma's side while he was wielding anything.

Fortunately, the Seeker let the tool fall back onto its plate as one of his condescending smirks surfaced. "I'll dumb my ambitions down for you," he said, as if he was doing Knockout a favour, slowly pacing back towards him. "I want to assemble a simple base code for all Cybertronians. I know one exists, else some of us would look like oversized cirkittens."

Knockout furrowed his eyeridges, fighting the urge to glance away. He didn't want to think of what might happen if he stopped watching Pharma. The Seeker spoke as if the feat was comparable to picking rust mites off a Minicon (easy enough, if you could tolerate all the high-pitched cursing from the angry little things). Every Cybertronian on the planet was assembled from a source code, either taken from a blueprint in the Well or from the combined codes of a sire and carrier. At least half of it was locked away behind firewalls and execution restrictions, barring even the most technologically adept scientists from examining it closely, but what little was free to read offered nothing revolutionary. 

"If there was any easy commonality between genetic codes, it would have been found by now," Knockout tried pointing out, only gaining a skeptical smirk from his mentor. 

"You think so?" Pharma asked, almost wiggling an eyeridge at him. "Even with all our research, we know very little about ourselves. Just mapping out a single Seeker's source code can take a whole stellar cycle, and we're the most _simple_ variant." He laughed, a hiccup of a sound, followed by a sigh as if just thinking about it made him pitiful. 

"You're a smart mech, Knockout," he admitted, and Knockout had to take a nanoklick to ensure his audios weren't glitching. "Not much compared to me, but a good deal better than the other scrap littering the place." Ah, so Pharma hadn't _completely_ lost himself, at least. The Seeker quirked his eyeridge higher, challenging his protege to think. "You can't summon any reason for it being skipped over? Something that could solve just about every medical puzzle right back to Primus' birth?"

Like with many things, the way Pharma said it made the answer sound painfully obvious to everyone else in the room. Knockout could only shrug. "I've never given much thought to it, honestly."

Pharma gave a mock display of disappointment before abandoning it for a satisfied smirk. "I believe the reason nothing common has been found is because..." His digits found another instrument, a serrated saw this time, the blade spinning slowly against his digit. "Anyone looking has been too afraid to cut _deep_ into it."

There was an emphasis in his voice that pressed clarity onto why there were so many gurneys and waste bins in the room. 

Either entranced by the blade or allowing a few nanoklicks for realisation to sink in for Knockout, Pharma eventually let the toy fall back as his wings shrugged. "Of course, I had to be certain you weren't afraid of being caught. No-one likes a snitch, after all, least of all me." The threat couldn't have been more thinly veiled if it was hidden behind a pleasure drone's translucent chest plating.

Despite future energon stains already starting to mark his processor. Knockout wasn't sure if the threat would even be necessary. "Sounds like something the Institute might dabble in," he said.

Pharma offered another laugh through the slits of his denta. "The Institute would do a lot more than kill for what I'm planning." He held out his hand, the most inviting thing he'd done since the day they met. "Don't you want to make some history, Knockout?"

After the longest few nanoklicks of his life, Knockout took Pharma's hand, trying to ignore the slimy sensation oozing through his digits.


	8. Chapter 8

At first Knockout's lessons proceeded as normal, with the only difference between the grim new knowledge hooked deep into his processor, that his professor really was the psychopath that fit all the rumors. This was a mech who got into medicine just for a good excuse to slice bots open, and he just outright admitted it for no-one except his apprentice to hear. He watched Knockout measure out samples and record results from repeatedly mundane experiments with a new weight to his stare, a thin threat permanently glazing his optics. It reminded Knockout far too much of his sire's stare.

Even his evenings with Dragstrip, the only thing to look forward to in the day, did little to soothe his nodes. Despite Pharma's dismissal, Knockout was too smart to put blackmail past him if it turned out to be necessary. Just one comm to Straxus about his son being the bane of Protihex police as well as Polyhex, and he would either have Knockout kicked through the Academy gates or, worse, dragged back home and sentenced to life in the basement with the service drones. Ironic that it was Straxus' own insistence on medical academy that caused the whole mess from the start.

Either way, Knockout was being forced down a path that only lead into thin, bottomless air over a cliff face. He didn't know how obvious his frustration was until Dragstrip herself gracefully pointed it out past the finish line;

"You look like you just found something that crawled up your tailpipe and died there."

"Thanks for that mental image," he muttered over a hiss of his exhaust as his systems frantically tried to vent cold air into his boiling engine block. Sirens blared and faded from existence overhead on the pipe bridge between north and west Protihex, still searching for the two long-gone racers panting in the shadows of the broken downtown tunnels. 

"I'm serious," Dragstrip said, pouring a bottle of coolant over her faceplate to speed up the mandatory cool-down period. Even with his sour mood, Knockout had to tell himself not to stare at the droplets running down the maroon details of her neck cables and chestplates. Out of politeness if not stubbornness to look as pissed off as possible. "You've never looked like this after a race, even when you lose." Tactfully she didn't point out that he _always _lost against her, with her new nitrogen tanks and ramped up engine courtesy of Fanta's new system mod services. Knockout had to decline any adjustments- subtlety was not achieved by having luminescent decals and sideburners.__

__"So what's the big deal?" Dragstrip went on, shaking her helm left and right and spraying coolant drops everywhere. "Daddy cut your allowance for the semester?" she asked, adopting a faux pout that was somehow adorable and infuriating all at once._ _

__"He hardly gives me enough as it is, if you must know," he grumbled, folding his servos over despite the protesting creaks from his joints thanks to hitting the breaks positioned in his shoulders too hard._ _

__Dragstrip's faceplate went blank aside from raised eyeridges, the optics underneath studying Knockout harshly. "Alright, jeesh, just snap my neck cables off, why don't you," she huffed, instantly making him feel guilty as her own servos folded tight around her chest. He was sluggishly forming an apology as her offence evaporated, replaced by another look he couldn't quite decipher. "...Femme trouble?" she asked._ _

__All the simmering rage in Knockout's processor was wiped at the suggestion, and he was snorting laughter before he could figure out why. "Well, you're the only one I know around here and yes, you _are_ giving me trouble," he answered through fits of chuckles. He was still laughing as Dragstrip punched his shoulder, not quite enough to damage the finish but still bound to bruise the protoform underneath. Over the ambiance of the underground nightlife their conjoined laughter was a signal of joy lifting high above the sirens and starscrapers, absorbed into the stars themselves long after the sound faded. The silence that came after wasn't awkward, more cathartic than anything else. It was the first time in a long forgotten while that Knockout felt peaceful. No-one could catch him down here; not the Enforcers, not his sire, not Pharma. Not even his own conscience._ _

__All he needed was himself and Dragstrip by his side, even if she kept jabbing into it with her elbow._ _

__"... You know I'm just kidding with you, right?" she asked in a quiet voice that didn't suit her.  
"Of course I do," Knockout said after a pause, eyeridges knitting together in confusion. Even when he snapped at her before, he knew she couldn't resist an opportunity to tease, even ill-timed ones._ _

__"So whatever it is that's got you like this... you can tell me, really." She shrugged, optics kept downcast. "If you wanna."_ _

__"...I'm not sure I do." Knockout answered after another, longer pause. The last thing he'd do was drag her into this mess, that he was sure of._ _

__Dragstrip brought her optics back up, the light highlighting the silver of her faceplate and the plum outline of her smiling lips. "Alright, then. I won't push it." She pushed off the rusted wall remains making up her seat towards Knockout. "But since racing obviously hasn't helped your mood a lot..."_ _

__Her digits were on his faceplate first, and then her lips curving so softly into his. A nanoklick of contact that left a lifetime impression._ _

__"I thought that might make you smile a little," she whispered, grazing her breath achingly against his lips before swiftly turning on her ped, making towards the road that first led them to their hiding place. Her T-Cog was whirring up by the time Knockout snapped out of shock, still feeling his tingling mouth._ _

__"Wait, Dragstrip-!" He closed the distance quickly between them both. He didn't know why he'd stopped her, at first contemplating telling her about everything, from his sire's poisonous ambition to Pharma's plans for systematic murder. But in the end, after nanoklicks of hovering, he just kissed her again. This time their lips didn't separate, and a certain part of the tunnel wall was marked by scuffs of gold paint being grinded against it for hours on end._ _


End file.
